…the humming of the sewing machines?
Everyone busy, busy finishing the quilts for the Quilt Show? It seems a bit quiet here on our blog – where is everyone? ๐
Well, I for one am “glued” to my sewing machine chair, every afternoon after work! Heck – the only reason I am writing this is because I finished work, waiting for hubby to be done, so in the meantime I can give myself a little luxury of web-browsing…and of course then I find interesting things that I have to share! ๐
First, since we are all in the “finishing” mode (finishing quilts that is), I found few very useful things related to machine quilting. This blog is the one I mentioned a while ago and it has these really neat “Thread Talk from my sewing machine” occasional posts – lots of great inspiration of amazing free-motion quilting and then a good tutorial too.
OK, that first one is a bit advanced and I can already hear so many of you saying – oh, I can’t do that! Well, maybe not today, but remember – practice, practice, practice! ๐ However, if you love your walking foot and have been doingย lot of straight stitching or quilting “in the ditch” – look at this very nice video from Wendy Butler Berns, showing a nice “twist” on good old straight stitching!
Once you are tired from all your stitching, binding and labeling, head on to this amazing site, called COLOR EXPLORER,ย ย for some play with colors – YAY!! I really like this site! You can upload your own photo or find one you like, (or it can be fabric?), and get all the colors from it extracted as a color palette! Then you can save your palettes, you can export them, print them and –ย take them to the quilt shop to hunt for fabric of course! ๐ How cool is that!?
Here are two examples I made from two photos I took in my garden while ago:
This is a close-up of lavender flowers growing in my front yard and next to it are all the colors from it – I am sure you can see a beautiful quilt in these, right?
Or for a warmer set of colors – here is the photo of the lily growing next to my White Dawn rose bush – another set of amazing colors for a quilt, don’t you think?
You know, once the rush around the Quilt Show is over, I think I will do this once a week: find a nice photo, get the colors from it and try to design a quilt in my EQ using these colors and then post it all here on the blog…lets’ call it “INSPIRATION MONDAY”? Even better, if you venture into this kind of fun – send me your colors to post here! Or just send me a photo and I will do the rest – What do you think, would you like this? Let me know!
Just to show you that I am not only surfing the web – I did finish something! These are my contributions to our Mini quilt Auction:
These are all made using that great “woven” technique described in Ana Faustino’s book “Simply Stunning Woven Quilts” – it is such a fun technique, you can’t stop making them!
I teach this in Threads of Time too and every time I have a class, one more wall hanging is made (as I am showing my students how to do it) – so needles to say, lots of them piled on my WIP (Work Inย Progress) pile… I figured Christmas and Cats – two popular things for the Auction, right?
OK ladies, my “break” is over – time to get back to the sewing machine!!
See you all soon at the Quilt Show,
Marija
0 Comments
Amazing FM feathers
Love the color palette from a photo! I may have to do this sometime.